American Visionary Art Museum

The American Visionary Art Museum is unlike any other museum in the United States. It collects, preserves, and celebrates the work of self-taught artists — people who made art outside any tradition, training, or institutional framework. The results are extraordinary, disturbing, funny, and occasionally transcendent.

Located just south of the Inner Harbor on Key Highway, AVAM occupies a converted industrial building with gallery spaces that match the eccentric energy of the work they contain. The collection includes folk art, outsider art, prison art, and religious visionary work — categories that blur together here. The gift shop is one of the best museum shops in Baltimore. Budget two hours minimum; many people spend the entire afternoon.

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AVAM was founded by Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, who had no museum background but a conviction that American self-taught art — the work of people who made art because they had to, not because they were trained to — deserved serious institutional attention. The building itself is partly decorated by the late "Whirligig Man," a local visionary artist named Vollis Simpson, whose enormous wind-powered kinetic sculptures still spin outside.

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